So, my main complaint with Lois McMaster Bujold’s book Sharing Knife 2: The Legacy was that there was very little plot. Now, I’ve said before (and I’ll say again) that Ms. Bujold is particularly and peculiarly good at plot, specifically at winding together three or four strands of plot so that they come together at the right times. So it’s disappointing when one of her books is loosely and thinly plotted.
I had been thinking that the problem was that instead of writing a whole series of books, she was writing one big novel in two parts, and so she felt she had to shoehorn all of the world creation into a thousand or fifteen hundred pages. The way that “ground” works, for instance, is laid out in broad terms, then filled in with some examples, then filled in with some discussion about the theory of it, then there are examples that appear to counter the theory, and then there are discussions about the ways that the theory may need to change to accommodate the examples. None of which have anything to do with the plot. Oh, the examples (some of them) are plot-related, but not as examples, and if we never found out anything about how the magic works, it would work just the same.
Now, as much as I grumble, I do accept that if you have an interesting or unusual framework for your magic/physics/zoology/botany/meteorology, it can make the book interesting and unusual. Sometimes, that’s the way to provide depth and texture, and I’m not absolutely against depth and texture, as long as they don’t get between me and a story. But one of the great things about interminable story cycles like the Vorkosigan books is that each story can have a light sprinkling of depth and texture, rather than one story having the whole bin dumped on it. That’s what I diagnosed was happening here.
Sadly, Your Humble Blogger was wrong again. Ms. Bujold has already written a third book and is working on a fourth. This is an interminable story cycle, and therefore all my theorizing was wrongy wrong wrong. Ah, well. Perhaps the third book will be more plot-heavy, and the fourth as well. I’ll be picking them up to find out, anyway.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.